This Gallery Is Selling Vintage NASA Photos Like High Art3 min read

NASA produced these prints for science or souvenirs. Now, they’re objets d’art that sell for thousands.

If you were a visiting dignitary to the U.S. in the 1970s, you might have received a printed photograph shot by an astronaut; perhaps the famous Earthrise, the haunting 1968 photo that depicted the Earth from the Moon, printed in one of NASA’s photographic laboratories. Over time, your souvenir would have yellowed and aged; perhaps you stuck it in a drawer, or passed it along to your grandkids, or threw it out with old papers. After all, the value of a decades-old print wouldn’t seem clear.

You’d be surprised to find out, then, that today your forgotten scrap might net thousands of dollars on the market. (A print of Earthrise sold at auction last year for about $9,200). As these stellar photos have aged and become rare in our era of digital archives, NASA’s physical printed images have become objets d’art—and this week, one gallery even launching a store to sell them.

“We first encountered vintage NASA photographs in 2011 at a major auction in London,” says Henry Little, co-owner of Breese Little, “and they were an amazing revelation.” The gallery bought a number of the images, and ended up staging two exhibitions and several smaller events at art fairs around the images. The response from viewers was “tremendous,” Little says. “Interest in them has been more or less constant since the first show.”

This week, the gallery launched a stand-alone store dedicated to selling these photographs. “Typically they’re sourced from people who have close collections with NASA and [the] space program over the 1960s and 70s,” Little explains, and the site draws its pieces from the inventory of an expert on the prints. The gallery sells original prints like a time lapse of the 1966 launch of Gemini 10 ($1,300), or the famed Earthrise ($4,000). A later print from 1984 shows an astronaut on a spacewalk outside the space shuttle Challenger ($1,500).

Many of them bear the marks of the NASA center that produced them, soon after the film returned to Earth, along with details about the print number and other details about their provenance. Fewer bear a purple “press” stamp. which means they were produced for external use. The gallery is careful to note these are different than, say, a reprint signed by an astronaut. “In our eyes the presence of a signature on the face of a vintage photograph would reduce both its financial and aesthetic value,” it writes.

The shift from scientific document to high art is one that traces the outlines of modern art itself. Many of these images were shot for scientific purposes, without any obvious artistic intent. Just as artists of the midcentury were pushing that definition of what constitutes “art,” reframing these prints as fine art asks us to rethink why we assign certain values on some objects and not others.

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